Pointed Ears, and the Weight of a Champion
Elves… pointed ears… a sensitive spot… the race that makes those indecent little sounds if you so much as fiddle with an ear…
There had been a minor commotion — I'd been admiring swimsuit skins, then abruptly thrown myself into making a new skin for Märchen — but at any rate, I had finally arrived at the second city.
"…Is the trend these days to throw the protagonist in jail?"
And once again, I was in a cell.
At this rate, was I going to get a complimentary prison tour every time I set foot in a new city? Don't tell me someone on the Raider dev team had a prison fetish.
This time, though, I wasn't particularly worried. With nothing more than the title Elite Soldier Killer, I had already proved once that I wasn't a dangerous individual. And the me of right now held a new title on top of it: Ruler Killer. Worry couldn't have arisen even if it wanted to.
So I kept talking with the viewers, perfectly at ease.
"This city is seriously pretty, though. Even while they were dragging me off to jail, I was busy sightseeing."
How was I supposed to describe it…? Like somewhere fairies out of a storybook would live? Like the elf village you'd expect to walk into in a fantasy? The kind of city where just living there would pickle you in phytoncides?
If I had to put it into words, that was the feeling.
And yet, for all they'd dressed the atmosphere up like an elven settlement, the signature race of fantasy — elves — didn't seem to live here. I could guess as much from the soldier escorting me.
If the soldier hauling me to prison had been an elf, I would have been able to confirm the traits. The representative elf trait, I mean: long, pointed ears.
But the soldier's ears were ordinarily short, and perfectly round. A tragedy, frankly.
"Elves… pointed ears… a sensitive spot… the race that makes those indecent little sounds if you fiddle with an ear… I was hoping I'd get to see one. What a shame."
I was waiting like that for this city's mayor to appear when someone walked up to the cell. …What? Where did the mayor go? It's just a soldier.
"Oh? This time they're not locking me up until I prove my purity?"
All at once, I started liking this city's mayor.
The mayor's name was Afaneru. She was the sort of character who radiated, hard, the feeling of a lofty and unsullied elven princess.
Afaneru's single greatest feature was that her ears were pointed.
Which is to say, a real elf, with not one single degree of room for misunderstanding.
"…When does the Afaneru pickup drop?"
Wow…. They absolutely nailed the model, too.
If she comes out as a pickup character, I am pulling her. No question.
If she comes out as a pickup, there'll be a line where she blushes and asks you not to touch her ears, because they're sensitive, right? …Do we get moaning, too?
Even while I was thinking that, the story kept moving, and I was able to prove my innocence in short order.
Well, of course. Do you have any idea how many Apostles I've taken down by now?
And the moment I proved my innocence, the elf mayor broke into a pouring sweat, darted her eyes all over the place, and immediately planted her face in a bow. She did it so naturally that it took a beat longer than it should have for me to even grasp what had just happened.
The instant my brain caught up to the situation, a single remark shot straight out of my spinal cord without passing through my brain at all.
"…Huh?"
It was the moment the image she had been showing me until just now — the lofty, unsullied elven princess — crumbled to pieces.
…All right. Decision made.
"The second you drop, you're a confirmed max dupe."
And so, having watched my meeting with the elf mayor — whose release could not come soon enough — and the SOS request that flowed out of her like water, it had become a fitting time to call an end to today's Part 1.
"Then let's wrap Raider here for today…. For Part 2, how about we do mostly Just Chatting for once? It's been a while."
With half of recent broadcasts given over to playing Raider, I had, admittedly, been neglecting Just Chatting to an excessive degree.
Right. Every so often you need a day devoted to actually talking. Balance matters, no matter what you're doing.
"When do you think Raider's next major update is?"
And the first topic of Just Chatting was Raider.
…I couldn't help it. I'd been playing Raider right up until a moment ago, so my brain was pickled in it. Today especially — I'd looked at swimsuit skins, and I'd met a character I was now praying would actually release.
And among the people around me, who could I have an in-depth Raider conversation with? Aside from the viewers watching my stream, basically no one.
If you excluded the viewers, maybe Eunha? But even Eunha only played once in a very great while, so asking her for an in-depth Raider talk was a bit much.
So Raider becoming the first topic was an entirely natural phenomenon.
Of course, from the viewers' perspective, it didn't look like a natural phenomenon in the slightest.
…Don't tell me these people had already cooled on Raider?
Fortunately, that didn't seem to be the case.
"Somewhere between five and seven weeks? If it goes any longer than that, you can't help feeling the update cycle is too slow. Eight weeks is, with only a little exaggeration, basically saying you spent nearly two months with no update."
And nine weeks…. I didn't even want to imagine it. A content drought past two months? I genuinely couldn't breathe.
"Six weeks really is the standard, isn't it? Ichikami does its major updates on a six-week interval, too. Still, I could see them spending about a week in a no-pickup lull that just feels like dead air, so…."
…Saying it out loud, five weeks was pretty clearly just my wishful thinking.
Oh — and since we were on updates, there was one more thing I ought to say. I'd meant to bring it up when the stream started, but I'd been thrown off by a song and it had slipped my mind.
"Also, I'm thinking of changing my regular day off. Not right away, and it's not certain…. I suspect it'll move from Thursday to Monday."
"I got a late start on the boss First Clear attempt, remember? That was because I'd put something important on my day off, figured a Kyeonwang was out of the question, and gave up."
If Techsecular hadn't held out, stubborn to the last, until the day after my regular day off — if the First Clear had passed into someone else's hands —
then I probably never would have attempted a First Clear again after that. Once a person has given up once, giving up a second time isn't all that hard.
But I succeeded at the First Clear. And not just succeeded — I did it by global standards.
It was fair to say I had taken the seat of Raider world champion.
And once I actually sat in the world champion's seat, I found I liked it a great deal.
Sitting there isn't just about the honor. Unstinting donations from the whales come standard, YouTube views are all but guaranteed, and you even get a temporary influx of overseas viewers.
Yeah. It was good. Good enough that I didn't want to hand it to anyone else.
"So from now on, to make sure nothing like that ever happens again, I'll take my day off the day before a major update! And the next day, with my mind firmly made up, I'll go into the boss Kyeonwang! Why? Because I'm the defending champion! Because I now have a duty to crush the challengers!"
Ah. I felt like that line had been pretty cool.
Since we were already on the subject of champions, I went ahead and floated an image of a champion belt somewhere around my waist.
And I felt a peculiar kind of swag rolling off me. This was the power of the champion belt…?!
…I was going to have to buy an actual champion belt. Next time I landed a First Clear, I'd do the ceremony with the belt itself.
In the end I couldn't hold down the feeling strangely welling up, and my mouth opened on its own.
"This is the weight of a champion…. Now that I've put the belt on, I can feel it all over again…."
I watched the chat for a moment without saying a word, then shut the cam off entirely.
And then, all of a sudden, a narration started up, as if dropping foreshadowing for something far in the future.
And so my day off became the day before Raider's major updates.
Of course, my manager — and Loe's manager — already knew.
I'd said so at the three-way meeting the day before, when we were going over the schedule. That I might need to adjust things because of the boss First Clears.
The split second those two failed to keep their expressions under control.
I still haven't forgotten that split second.
…But a title defense is serious business, isn't it?